Portfolio effect and asynchrony as drivers of stability in plant-pollinator communities along a gradient of landscape heterogeneity

Understanding how pollination services can be maintained in increasingly anthropogenic landscapes is a current challenge for basic and applied ecology. The stability of plant-pollinator communities might increase in heterogeneous landscapes with a high diversity of species and alternative habitats, both through increased portfolio effect (property of communities to fluctuate less than the sum of its counterparts) and decreased synchrony (coincident changes in species abundance). However, how these drivers of stability (portfolio effect and synchrony) vary along land-use gradients remains largely unknown. Using independent samplings for plants, pollinators, and their interactions in Mediterranean communities along a gradient of landscape heterogeneity, we assessed the relationships between within-year stability and its drivers; and between the drivers of stability, landscape heterogeneity, and species diversity. Besides, we evaluated the relationships between the drivers of interaction s...